Xen minimalism may be a good thing after all the fashion towards the small even micro electronics device is not a new phenomenon but with the arrival of Apples new Ipod Mini, Xens baby EMP 200 could not have arrived at a better time.

It certainly majors on style with the black front panel with quad control stick neatly tucked below a negative neon blue display, the sides and rear of the Xen are aluminium with a real metal feel unlike some of its more plastic competitors, size wise its 75 x 35 x17mm and fits neatly into the palm of you hand and its also quite light with the official figure at 40 grams without batteries.

But the Xen EMP 200 is not just a pretty face it comes in two guises either 128mb or 256mb flash disk which is enough to hold a days worth of MP3, ASF or WMA audio files which are moved to the unit via he supplied media sync software which can also manage other files making the Xen a portable flash disk. While we were taken with its appearance the more technical bods were quick to point out that it is loaded with goodies, an in built FM tuner is a nice touch along with direct recording to MP3 with full variable bit rate control, sources can be supplied via the line in or microphone sockets or direct from the FM tuner.

The in built microphone also allows you to make MP3 or ASF recordings direct to the Xen, this feature makes the most of the automatic gain control and voice activated recording goodies, so the Xen can also act as a Dictaphone removing the need for one more gadget in the portable kit of electronics we lug around everyday. We had a play with the direct encode with both microphone and also line in, its possible to make recordings up to 256kbits which were excellent quality for such a small box of tricks, the line in Feature is great with a CD player it can be set to sense the gaps between tracks and create separate files, while most users will rip CD's on PC and then push them over with a full ID3 tag this is a great feature which will prove useful when you want a copy of a mates CD.

Driving the Xen EMP 200 is simple, the navigation system is easy enough with the four way joystick and clustered buttons allowing easy one handed operation and the menu tree seems to have the options where you expect them allowing for quick navigation by artist, album, track etc.

Battery life in our tests was a respectable 16 hours from a set of Duracell AAA batteries and the audio quality via the provided earphones was good but the line out quality really surprised us and seemed to at least subjectively outperform our Ipod.

All round the Xen EMP 200 is a solid performer with a great deal of style, it has a full feature set and at £110 for the 128mb version its priced to sell well in the flash disk MP3 marketplace.

 128mb Verison

256mb Version

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